Workshop – Subversions from the Informal and Social Economy

Project at-a-glance

The research explores variations on food initiatives, projects, etc. that operate within the social or informal economy. We’re looking to understand the role of these activities in food security and community development, and to identify how they can benefit marginalized communities, including low-income groups, Aboriginal people, youth and women. We’re also exploring how social economy initiatives can provide important environmental stewardship services.

By ‘social and informal economy’, we’re talking about a range of activities that are on the margins, loosely organized, and sometimes not even recognized as economic activities. Within the food sector, such informal, undervalued activities include self-provisioning, barter, food sharing, unpaid labour, environmental remediation and rehabilitation.

Capturing Outcomes

Specifically, the research asks whether and how a social economy of food can/does:

increase prosperity for marginalized groups;

build adaptive capacity to increase community resilience;

bridge divides between elite consumers of alternative food products and more marginalized groups;

At the workshop, with the webinars as a common starting point, we won’t have to spend a lot of time on the ‘what’, and will be more able to get right into exploring the proxies that these food-based projects, initiatives and organizations can use to effectively capture, measure and communicate outcomes in these five areas—outcomes that indicate social return on investment, collective impact, and/or increased community capital.

The plan is for a brief intro/recap of the case studies, with the rest of the morning spent getting everyone’s heads into thinking about how to think about evaluation, indicators, metrics, ways of measuring and reporting that are useful and relevant for social and informal economy projects [esp. food-related]…

We’ve been thinking and talking about this in many different ways, so we want to come together and hash out what way